It's Hard Because You're Trying
10 October 2024
Welcome to this week’s NTTWC newsletter!
Thank you for subscribing to No Time to Write Club. We’re thrilled you’re here.
Tes and I posted our monthly podcast today, in which we discuss the parts of the writing process and particular writing tasks that are difficult. And the simple truth is that it’s hard to do something well. And if sometimes you really feel that struggle, then you’re doing it right. While our conversation took several entertaining excursions into writing craft and the writing life, we kept coming back to how it’s nice to have friends when the work gets hard. Even when I didn’t know what I was doing and felt beat down by the creative process this month, knowing I had an hour to spend working side by side with other writers made the difference between being stuck and making incremental but meaningful forward progress. It doesn’t take much sometimes. Just presence.
This first month of No Time to Write Club has been so fun and productive—certainly for Tes and me, and also for the folks who have joined us on Zoom and on the chat. We’ve done our first four weeks of two synchronous sprints a week, with participants logging 39 person-hours of writing time (GO YOU!!!), as well as our first social hour and our first two asynchronous sprint days. Folks have brought all manner of projects to NTTWC time, from first drafts to final drafts, Spanish homework to cover letters— and every time, we each get a little closer to meeting our goals.
If you’re a free subscriber, we hope you’ll give paid membership a try and join us! You can use your free trial and have a week of access to see how you like it. A schedule of our events is below.
And we’d love to hear from you in the comments! What would make the hard parts of writing easier for you?
—Sara
No Time to Write Club Schedule: October 6–October 31, 2024
To join our sprints you must be a paid subscriber :)
Zoom links are below for paid subscribers.
Sunday, October 13, 4:30pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)
Wednesday, October 16, 9:00pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)
Wednesday, October 23, 9:00pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)
Thursday, October 24, 12:00pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)
Sunday, October 27, 4:30pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)
Tuesday, October 29: Asynchronous Sprint Day, 6AM–11pm ET on the Substack Chat
Wednesday, October 30, 9:00pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)
Your Opportunity to Provide Scheduling Input!
We’d like to schedule our events at times that the most people can make. In mid-October, we will poll paid and free subscribers to see what times work best for you.
October Podcast
In which we discuss what it’s like when writing is difficult—and why that means you’re doing it right. Our next podcast episode will be out on November 7.
What We’re Up To
Tes is having a somewhat unplanned week of collapsing and regrouping. Turns out not scheduling vacation time for months on end is a really, really bad idea. (And now every seasoned entrepreneur/freelancer is nodding and thinking, “Yeah, I could have told you that!”)
Sara is working on line-level revision of her novel, which means minute attention to detail and a lot of staring with furrowed brow at the laptop screen.
In the NTTWC Community
“This group hit at the perfect time for me. I’d been circling for months getting back into my writing groove when life kept getting in the way. But knowing that I have other writers out there ready to support and encourage me to get my butt in the chair, made all the difference! Next book: How Laura got her writing groove back 😃”
—Laura Jordan, novelist
Please send us your news and announcements for future newsletters!
Zoom links below for paid subscribers
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Time To Write Club to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.